Forbes College Rankings

[78crusader]

Forbes has just come out with its annual college rankings.  VU is ranked as the 72nd best college in the midwest.  Does this sound impressive to the folks on this board?  Because it doesn't sound that great to me.

Paul

[vu72]

Forbes has just come out with its annual college rankings.  VU is ranked as the 72nd best college in the midwest.  Does this sound impressive to the folks on this board?  Because it doesn't sound that great to me.

Paul

My first reaction was the same as yours.  However, when you consider that "The Midwest" includes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota and that there are 83 colleges in just Indiana, then it makes the number pretty impressive.

[vu84v2]

I have not looked at the detail of the Forbes rankings, but you have to look closely at the criteria for the rankings. Valparaiso University does an excellent job of 'knowing who they are' and prioritizing what fits versus their mission (i.e. delivering an excellent education for undergraduate students and, to some extent, to graduate students). Consistent with their mission, Valparaiso places academic research as a lower priority. Thus, if you compare Valparaiso to all midwestern universities and use research as one of the main criteria, it can look worse compared to almost any flagship or secondary state university. If you take it to an extreme, if you used the UT-Dallas rankings Valparaiso would look to be among the bottom 50% of universities in the midwest and country because those rankings only use research as a criteria. US News and World Report's ranking break out universities into groups that reflect the degree of research, and Valparaiso consistently does very well when compared to its peers.

[covufan]

Full list:

https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/8/#tab:rank

Valpo is #337

Methodology:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2017/08/02/top-colleges-2017-the-methodology/#15dc256e44a9

[usc4valpo]

Valparaiso is nationally at 337? I am not getting warm fuzzies over that. I wonder if the ranking ng can be attributed to Valpo's lack of graduate studies and research.

[usc4valpo]

Valparaiso is nationally at 337? I am not getting warm fuzzies over that. I wonder if the ranking ng can be attributed to Valpo's lack of graduate studies and research.

[vu84v2]

The criteria for this ranking seems to be pretty heavy on graduate salary, famous/high impact alumni and student debt. Post-graduate success is the highest weighted category, and it is comprised of salary and famous/high impact alumni. From looking at the actual rankings, this would seem to create a fairly strong bias against midwestern universities. There are only three midwestern universities in the top 35 (University of Chicago, Northwestern and Notre Dame).

As I stated before, Valparaiso knows who they are and rightly focus on teaching and the success of its undergraduates. Thus, I see no reason to be terribly concerned about these rankings.

[Vale O. Paradise]

Valpo was #234 in the same list 2 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2015/07/29/the-full-list-of-forbes-top-colleges-2015/#1051d6bc25ba

Far from a sign that Valpo is dropping the ball, that huge jump just shows that lists like this aren't worth much. If you get such radically different outputs from a test when all the inputs haven't can't change that much in such a short time span, there's something funky with your test...like perhaps the faulty premise that you can create some kind of meaningful comparison between such institutions as The University of Texas and Franciscan University of Steubenville.

I am slightly more interested in lists that compare smaller groups of institutions that are actually peers, such as USNews' regional university rankings. But even with those, the difference between #1 and #10 is probably negligible.

[vu84v2]

Great point about how these rankings "split hairs".

[ml2]

For all of the complex methodologies that these various rankings (Forbes, US News etc.) come up with - they can all be pretty well approximated (especially for private and/or non-engineering only schools) by using a single variable - how wealthy are the families that send their children there?

Check out this awesome data set from the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html

and here is the specific page for Valpo.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/valparaiso-university

The challenge for Valpo is that many of the schools we'd like to be grouped with academically and/or athletically (Creighton, Davidson, Gonzaga, Butler, Xavier, St. Mary's (CA), Belmont - to name a few) all have significantly more potential financial resources among their alumni and parents.